RUNNING TIMES

The Most Likely Return of Boston Billy

Nearly 30 years have passed since Bill Rodgers won his fourth and final Boston Marathon. Now, after battling cancer, he's ready to run Boston again, and prove once more why he is the People's Champion.

"I've read that Michael Phelps is wired like that," says Rodgers. "You follow what you want. You can't always follow other things, but you can focus on what you like. I was lucky to finally find the marathon. It gave me something to sink my teeth into."

Even he struggles to comprehend his two natures: laid-back Bill and laser-focused Bill. "I became intense about the marathon," Rodgers says. "But I am nowhere near that intense in the rest of my life. In fact, I think running is the only way in which I'm competitive. I have a need to run and sometimes I love it. It's probably because I wasn't really good at anything else."

"Billy really didn't have other things to fall back on," says Meyer, who met Rodgers at the IAAF World Cross-Country Championships in Glasgow in 1978. "And I'm guessing that created anxiety at times. Most people hedge their bets with something. Billy never did."

Even Rodgers must be joking when he says Bob Kempainen threw away a promising career in distance running for a misspent life as a physician: "We had this great marathoner, but he wanted to become a doctor! He shouldn't have done that." When I suggest to Rodgers that most people broaden their interests as they grow older, he puts his hands to his eyes to simulate blinders and says: "Not me. I'm very much like this."

It's hard now to fathom how improbable his 1975 Boston victory was. Jason Kehoe, who had drunk-jogged the final yards of the marathon course with Rodgers in 1972, says: "Three years after that night, I'm watching him run the same stretch, but he's winning the Boston Marathon for real. It was unbelievable."

The victory was no more believable to those closest to him. His sister, one year younger, was watching the TV news in Hartford that evening. "They kept saying the name 'Bill Rodgers' and showing all these police motorcycles," says Martha, who could be forgiven for wondering if perhaps he had robbed a bank.

His father was handing out exams that day at Hartford State Technical College, where he was a professor of mechanical engineering. He told his students, in a tone of mild exasperation, "My son is running in that crazy Boston Marathon today." He thought it was a goofy and perhaps dangerous thing to do.

Rodgers stopped four times for water that day and a fifth time to tie his shoe at the base of Heartbreak Hill. Still, he ran 2:09:55, a time he himself did not believe when he found out afterward. "I can't run that fast," he protested.

But he could. In the first five-borough New York City Marathon, in 1976, Rodgers was surprised to see, as he ran up Manhattan's East Side Drive, a set of stairs he had to climb. "We didn't care," he says. "We were running the course blind." He won the race.

In the next five years, Rodgers won four straight New Yorks, three more Bostons, and three times was ranked the world's top marathoner, a streak book-ended by Boston pedestals: The wooden platform for the winner at the finish line in '75, and that porcelain plinth of the dentist's toilet near the starting line the next decade.

For 15 straight years, Rodgers never missed more than two consecutive days of running. But in 2003, on an eight-mile training run on Nantucket the day after His Bartender Friend Tommy Leonard's race, Rodgers's right tibia snapped. He fell like a gunshot victim at the side of the road. He hitchhiked from a seated position—a sweat-soaked, grimacing spectacle with his butt on the ground and his thumb in the air. A teenager in a Jeep finally stopped for him.